attuned to the steady pitch. One didn't realize how annoying a nuisance it was until it stopped. As the stellar generators let down on the drag on the Sun, the gravity within the ship lessened. In a few moments there was a condition of zero, and those who had forgotten to strap themselves down found that they were floating about in the air, most of them giddy.

There was a shift in the pitch, and the generators applied repulsion against the pull of the Sun. Those floating in the air crashed suddenly against the ceiling, then slid violently down the walls onto the floor as the inner sphere rotated on its gymbals to meet the new center of gravitational pull—this time away from the Sun.

The viewers flickered off and then on again as their connecting surfaces inside and outside the sphere's double layer of walls slid apart and matched up again. For an instant, as he saw the viewers blank out, Burl thought of what might happen if the sphere didn't rotate all the way. They would find themselves blind.

Now the ship proceeded on its charted orbit, slowing to meet Venus. Several hours went by, one meal, and Burl had returned to his bunk, his rest period having arrived. Russ remained at the controls on duty, checking astronomically the new speed and deceleration.

Burl tossed restlessly, the light out in the little cabin. Something was bothering him, and after a while he realized that Clyde should have come off duty before this. He glanced at the clock and calculated that Russ was two hours overdue. What was wrong?

He slipped out of his bunk and climbed into his pants. Ascending into the control room, he saw Lockhart, the two astronomers, and the entire engineering crew gathered over the controls in worried concentration.

He peered over their shoulders, but the dials meant little to him, since he did not know what they should have said. "What's happened?" he asked Russ.

Russ took him aside. "We're not going to make our connection with Venus," he said. "Our generators didn't operate exactly as we had hoped. We haven't been able to slow down enough, the pull of the Sun is stronger than the power we can raise to stop it at our present speed. We're going to shoot past Venus' orbit way ahead of the planet, and we're still heading sunward at a faster rate than we figured on."

"You mean—we're falling into the Sun!" gasped Burl.

"As things 

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